Watch
by PhoenixCaptain
Summary: Her life - returned. One life, in trade for sixteen. Thus a terrible massacre began. And she could only watch. [Oneshot]


She watched him slay an entire world.

It all began with her death. She, a helpless bystander, incorporeal, could only observe as he mourned. As his mourning turned to rage. As his rage doomed a world already long ago forsaken.

She watched as he stole - stole an ancient sword, stole _her,_ and rode away into endless night with only the crescent moon to witness his treachery. She followed him, but he could not see her, could not hear her cries of "Stop, please, it isn't worth it!"

He rode on. Rode on, heedless of mountains in his path and black valleys and canyons that shattered the gray sky with tall rocks like fingers. All the while she followed. And could do nothing.

She watched as he crossed the threshold of death. Watched as lands forbidden swallowed him, claimed him as their own with greedy, grasping fingers. Watched as he placed her corpse upon an ancient altar and struck a terrible, irreversible bargain -

Her life - returned. One life, in trade for sixteen.

She crumpled to immaterial knees, eyes wide, horror flickering within her transparent face as she stared at the corpse that had once been her. And she watched, could do _nothing_ but watch, as a man no more a shell than her vanished into the cold mist.

.

She would not follow him. Not anymore. She would pad with silent feet through a crumbling old shrine, and sometimes she entertained the idea of leaving - escaping these awful lands, never to return.

But each time something held her back. _He_ held her back. He always returned, the blood of shadows on his hands, and his eyes held nothing anymore.

One time in particular he came back to the shrine, resting for only a moment from his terrible quest, and he pressed a shaking hand to her shell's cheek. Tears might have gathered in her eyes, if she could shed them, but incorporeal as she was, she could not. Instead she only wrapped her arms around him. She buried her face in his back and begged him to stop.

He could not hear her, nor feel her arms. With fierce determination lighting a burning fire in his once-cold eyes, he stepped right through her as if she no longer existed, and vanished into the Forbidden Lands once more.

.

Only once she followed him.

Curiosity bubbled within her, higher and higher, until one day it swallowed her - so she went with him, the next time he left. She followed him across an endless ravine, a beautiful emerald field, and a golden desert, all the while hawks wheeling in the sky above the man and his faithful steed.

Then a creature erupted from the desert, sand billowing around its massive form, and like an elegant ribbon it flowed through the sky as if it were one with the endless blue expanse.

She gaped, and watched it soar, peaceful as a songbird, majestic as a dragon.

Then that awful shell of a man nocked an arrow to his bow - aimed - _fired._ With a soul-wrenching agonized cry the beautiful dragon came swooping to the earth below, where there its stony wings dipped into the sands. The man kicked his mare, heels merciless, heedless of her heaving sides and pained breathing, and even when she could go no further he yelled at her to hurry ever faster.

"No, stop, please don't!" the ghost-maiden begged.

But he never listened before. Now was no exception. He kicked his horse ever harder, and she whinnied ever louder, and the dragon-creature loomed ever closer.

She watched. Could only watch, and nothing more, as he scaled the creature's wings and drove his awful sword into its innocent flesh.

Never once did it thrash. Never once did it retaliate. Never once did it intend him a whit of harm.

And as it fell he turned away, face devoid of even the simplest emotion, not a single twinge of regret flickering across his cold features.

She wondered if it was too terrible of her to hope - that he would die too, just so they could be reunited, and so that this massacre would stop.

.

From the shrine she watched as two more pillars of light flowed into the sky. She counted. Fifteen.

When he came back with once-red hair as black as the blood of beasts, she could only watch. She could not cry. Could not speak, for he would not hear her, anyway. And so she stared as he stood, and left, and she did not follow.

She knelt beside her corpse, amidst fifteen doves, and knew she would soon return to that shell.

.

They burst into the shrine, feet heavy and echoing, shouts deafening in the eternal silence of these forsaken lands.

And then _he_ returned, for the last time, and his enemies surrounded him with hands on the hilts of their swords.

He awoke. And his eyes pierced with all the ice of the beasts he had slain, and two horns jutted from the sides of his terrible dark head. She watched - could _only_ watch, as the very men who had sacrificed her and unwittingly started this massacre attacked the man-turned-demon.

The demon fought. Fought with giant fists and terrible shadowy horns. He, once human, now nothing more than the beasts.

But even with earth-shattering fists and a demonic roar he could do nothing. Nothing as his enemies escaped, tiny, worthless things in comparison to his terrible new form - not so different from the way he, naught more than an ant, had destroyed mountains.

Now _he_ was the mountain. And now _he_ fell.

And she could only watch.

Watch, as the men-once-enemies purged the shrine. Watch, as the man she had loved so long ago fought to reach her, one last time. Watch, as he stumbled back, helpless in the grasp of purgatory.

Then blackness engulfed her.

.

She awoke atop a familiar altar, stone cold beneath her skin.

Physical skin. Opaque skin.

She sat up, surprised, though she should not have been. She'd been expecting this for a long time now. Saddened eyes swept the land long forsaken, and she saw a black horse limping toward her - _his_ horse. Poor, tired, pained horse.

Tentative, cold feet slipped to the ground, and she stood on shaking legs. A ghost no more, she could _feel_ the bitter wind in her hair, icy air biting, stone unforgiving beneath her bare feet.

The black mare limped to the end of the shrine. She followed.

There, lying in the empty depression that had once been a pool - a baby.

A baby with a pair of cruel little horns atop his head, a mark of his curse. A baby lying in the exact same spot where _he_ had fallen. A baby that had been a monster. And she only stared at him, a grimace etched onto her lips as he wailed to the empty air.

But she remembered how she had loved him, once.

So she knelt by the child's side, and lifted him into her arms, the faintest of smiles growing on her lips as his cries quieted to gentle cooing.

And finally, for the first time in what felt like centuries, she stepped outside the ancient shrine. There before her eyes lay the ruins of a majestic bridge, the only link between civilization and an ancient, dead world.

She peered down at the little baby in her arms - the same monster who had ripped apart the last shreds of that world.

She had watched him destroy it.

The memory burned her, _consumed_ her as she turned her back to the outside world for the final time.

* * *

 **A/N: So I had the completely random idea just recently - what if Mono, as a spirit, watched Wander go through the Forbidden Lands for her sake? And this happened.**

 **Anyway, thanks for reading - and reviewing, if you'd like to. Feel free to offer critique if you have any. Thanks again!**


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